SPIELBERG UPSTAGES OSCAR RACE

It is a tribute to the unique success of director Steven Spielberg that he has become the most talked-about person in this year’s Oscar race for not receiving a nomination for “The Color Purple.”

Since Wednesday morning, when the 1985 Academy Award nominations were announced, people have been able to start conversations by bringing up James Garner’s surprise nomination as best actor (for “Murphy’s Romance”), or Hector Babenco’s nomination as best director (for “Kiss of the Spider Woman”).

But people who really want to talk, people who take their Oscars seriously and want to chew on them like a dog with a good femur, have only one thing on their minds: How could the academy give “The Color Purple” 11 nominations--and overlook its director?

The simple answer is that with the exception of best picture, which is voted on by all members of the academy, the individual nominees are determined by peer group branches. The 230 members of the directors branch simply found five directorial achievements from 1985 more deserving than Spielberg’s.

But did they really? Did they vote their consciences, or did they, as many of the dumbfounded Spielberg supporters in the industry believe, thumb their collective nose at a person who has had more success than they can stand?

“I don’t believe they did (snub him),” says Robert Wise, president of the academy and himself a two-time Oscar winner as best director. “I would like to think our directors are bigger than that, that they voted their artistic and creative feelings.”

Gilbert Cates, president of the Directors Guild of America and chairman of the directors branch of the academy, says he is puzzled whenever a movie is nominated as best picture and its director is overlooked, and vice versa.

If you like the painting, it’s customary to compliment the artist.

But Cates says he does not believe there’s an anti-Spielberg message to be read from the directors’ vote.

“The directors who were nominated all did extraordinary work,” he says. “They all deserve nominations.”

Still, Spielberg supporters have been blaming his snub on everything but a slipped disc in the Price-Waterhouse computer.

“I feel badly that he didn’t get a nomination,” says Richard Brooks, who’s been nominated twice as best director. “He’s the most successful director in the world. I guess when you get up that high, you’re bound to find people who will throw stones at you.”

Brooks says he believes the negative reviews of “The Color Purple” may have influenced some voters. Then again, maybe it’s because he got married, or because he shaved his beard.

“Just try to explain these things,” Brooks says. “All I know is he deserved a nomination, I voted for him, and I’m surprised he didn’t get one.”

There are others--the majority of those directors we contacted after Wednesday’s announcement--who say they were more surprised at the 11 nominations “The Color Purple” did get than the one it didn’t.

“What is astonishing to me is that they would give it 11 nominations,” says independent film maker Henry Jaglom. “I think the actors deserved nominations, but the rest of it was such a cartoon. He (Spielberg) took this wonderful material and turned it into zip-a-dee-doo-dah ‘Song of the South.’ ”

Jaglom and others suggest that Spielberg set himself up for this letdown by picking off a serious property, one that could have led to an extraordinary film in the right hands (the name Martin Ritt keeps coming up), and turned it into a sweet, non-threatening commercial entertainment.

“Everybody was watching to see what Steven could do with that book (Alice Walker’s novel, upon which the movie was based),” said one director, who refused to be quoted by name. “He said he was going to take a chance, do a film about characters and relationships.

“I think most of us believed he could do that, and if he had, he would gotten everything, the Oscar included. But it’s appalling what he did with that book. He either does not know how to explore relationships or he doesn’t want to deal with them.

“Either way, he turned ‘The Color Purple’ into a 2 1/2-hour episode of ‘Amazing Stories.’ ”

Some directors didn’t find the nominations for “The Color Purple” that surprising. There is a tendency each year for the various branches to focus on two or three of the perceived “big films.” And academy members are moviegoers; they do vote as much with their hearts as with their minds.

On that sentiment alone, Spielberg’s nomination was taken for granted.

But there was the perception, frequently mentioned by the film’s critics in the media, that Spielberg was counting on “The Color Purple” to deliver the Oscar that had eluded him three times before.

Then they saw the picture.

The normally publicity-shy Spielberg has been fairly visible in recent weeks, promoting “The Color Purple” and responding--with self-damning candor at times--to the criticism that he rounded “Purple’s” hard edges in order to broaden its audience.

“If you’re a nightclub entertainer, do you want to perform for three drunks or for a packed house?” Spielberg told The Times’ Charles Champlin, in an interview in Sunday’s Calendar. “Any artist wants the largest possible audience.”

Disregarding the other arts, those are difficult concepts for fans of Bergman, Bertolucci, Kubrick or even Woody Allen to grasp.

“An artist by definition isn’t facile, pandering to everybody,” says Jaglom. “An artist tries to get people to understand something about the human condition and be true to himself in doing it. He hopes everybody will appreciate it. That’s different from trying to calculate what everybody will appreciate.”

Jaglom, who is a member of the directors’ branch of the academy, says he’s proud of the group for not succumbing to the wave of sentiment for “The Color Purple.”

“The nominations for Babenco and (Akira) Kurosawa are great,” he says. “The whole thing is a sign that the directors branch is growing up.”

No matter what thinking went into the academy directors’ vote, the 1985 Oscars are going to be remembered as the year of the Spielberg Snub (file it under Oscar Oddities, along with the Brando Boycott and Mary Poppins’ Revenge), and it may not be over yet.

“The Color Purple,” whatever Spielberg’s peers think of it, is an enormously popular mass-entertainment film. And Spielberg, the closest Hollywood has come so far to breeding a successor to Walt Disney, is an enormously popular film maker.

Don’t be surprised if on March 24, after all 4,000 members of the academy have been polled, “The Color Purple” ends up winning the Oscar for best picture. There is the scent of referendum in the air, and the idea that Spielberg, as one of the film’s three co-producers, could end up on stage after all has the quaint appeal of a happy Hollywood ending.

Between now and then, there is the separate DGA voting for best director. Spielberg is one of the five nominees being considered by that 7,800-member body, composed largely of TV directors and production and stage managers. They may make a statement themselves when the winner is announced March 8.

In the meantime, Spielberg can take sustenance from his box-office mandate. To date, “The Color Purple” has grossed just under $40 million, and with 11 fresh nominations and a hot controversy to whip up even more interest, it may still be earning money by summer.

Spielberg is playing to a packed house all right. Now if he can get the three drunks.